Law of Patents, Layout Designs of Integrated Circuits, Plant Varieties, and Industrial Designs promulgated by Royal Decree No. M/27 of 2004.

This Law consisting of 65 articles aims at providing full protection for inventions, layout designs of integrated circuits, plant varieties and industrial designs. The King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology shall grant the protection document for one of the subject matters of protection. It may either be a patent, a certificate of layout design, a plant patent, or a certificate of an industrial design. The protection document shall not be granted if its commercial exploitation is harmful to life, to human, animal or plant health, or is substantially harmful to the environment (art.4). The applicant may benefit of a priority period from the date of the application, which for plant varieties shall be twelve months. Once the application for plant patent has been examined in terms of formalities, it shall be examined in terms of substance (art.13). The plant patent protection period shall be 20 years from the date of filing the application (25 years for trees). If a person, in good faith, exploits a plant variety, before the date of filing the patent application, or the priority application relating to that plant variety, such a party shall be entitled – despite the issuance of the protection document – to continue to perform these acts without expanding them (art.20).
Chapter 4 (arts.54-58) is entirely dedicated to provisions governing the protection of new plant varieties. It establishes that (i) the plant variety shall be patentable if it is new, distinct, uniform and stable, and proceedings have been taken to designate a denomination for it; (ii) the plant owner of the protection document may initiate an action against any person who infringes the patented variety by exploiting the propagating material of the patented variety without his consent; (iii) exploitation of the propagating material includes producing or propagating it, exporting, importing, offering it for sale or any other sort of marketing, and stocking; and (iv) obligations of the owner of the plant patent.